In this era of renewed interest in UFOs and aliens, we should take a look back to the

days of the Mercury and Apollo programs. Popular stories tell of unidentified spacecraft

witnessed by those early astronauts. And today we're going to pull these stories out

of the filing cabinet and have a look to see if our astronauts actually did record evidence

of space aliens visiting Earth. The astronauts and the aliens is coming up right now,

unskeptoid.

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You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. The astronauts

and the aliens. It was 1962 and American John Glenn was orbiting the Earth in Friendship

7, his capsule on the Mercury Atlas 6 flight. Ground controllers were mystified at Glenn's

report of fireflies outside his window, strange bright specs that clustered about his ship.

The first thought was that they must be ice crystals from Friendship 7's Hydrogen Paroxide

Attitude Control Rockets, but Glenn was unable to correlate their appearance with the use

of the rockets. Astronauts on later flights reported similar bright specs and eventually

we learned enough about the space environment to identify what they were. Spacecraft tend

to accumulate clouds of debris and contamination around themselves, and even though Glenn's

rockets sprayed jets of crystals away from the capsule, many of the crystals would gather

...